May 2014 Newsletter

Congrats 2014 Graduates!

Farewell to a long-time friend, colleague, and teacher...

We wish to extend our gratitude and warmest wishes to Roger Kirschner on his retirement this year. We also congratulate him, as he won the 2014 McCormack CEAS Outstanding Staff Award. How long has Roger's impact been felt at UC? Well, he was a veteran educator and lab manager even when the author of this newsletter learned from him as an undergrad in EECS)

EECS Annual Award Winners

On April 16th we honored our annual student, staff, and faculty award winners. The awardee list is available here.

Big News!

In 2009, EECS launched the Ohio Center for Microfluidic Innovation http://ceas.uc.edu/ocmi.html. The success of EECS faculty has now grown to the point where it is now a U.S.-wide National Science Foundation industry center, partnered with UC Irvine. The NSF center creation was lead at UC by EECS Prof. Ian Papautsky. Full story: http://www.uc.edu/news/NR.aspx?id=19697

Student Achievements

Congrats to Daniel Griffin, winner of a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, the most prestigious undergraduate award given in the sciences! Full story: http://ceas.uc.edu/news-1314/ceas-students-awarded-national-goldwater-scholarship.html

Jacob Wells won the 'Mr. Engineer' award at SWE's fundraising event, and donated his cash prize back to SWE!

Yuguang Liu from the BioMicroSystems Lab was awarded the 2014 Sigma Xi Grants-in-Aid of Research (GIAR) grant. The Sigma Xi GIAR program has a highly competitive application process and only approximately 20% of applicants receive any level of funding.

Yuguang Liu was also awarded the 2014 UC URC Graduate Student Research Fellowship for her project "Combining Digital and Continuous Microfluidics for Multiplex Immunoassay." This year 165 proposals were received and only 22% were selected.

Faculty Achievements

Ian Papautsky leads a team of University of Cincinnati researchers who have developed a point-of-care sensor to measure metal levels in humans. His efforts as principal investigator of the project earned him a nomination in this year's Cincinnati Business Courier Innovation Awards. http://ceas.uc.edu/news-1314/2014-innovation-award-seriespapautsky-produces-portable-sensor.html

Ian Papautsky and George Shaw (Department of Emergency Medicine) were awarded one of four collaborative projects through the latest round of the University Research Council interdisciplinary grants program. http://ceas.uc.edu/news-1314/ceas-researchers-named-interdisciplinary-grant-winners.html

Andrew Steckl, gave an Invited Presentation on "Circuits on Cellulose: From Transistors to LEDs, from Displays to Microfluidics on Paper" at Winter School on Bioelectronics, Kirchberg, Austria, Feb. 2014.

Marc Cahay and Jason Heikenfeld were honored at the University-Wide Faculty Awards, among a select few of inductees into the 2014 Class of the Academy of Fellows for Teaching and Learning (AFTL): http://www.uc.edu/cetl/about/aftl/members/aftl-class-of-2014.html

Jason Heikenfeld's work with Anton Harfmann (DAAP) on concepts for the next generation of solar lighting, was the #1 ranked UC news release of the year: http://www.uc.edu/news/NR.aspx?id=19032

Jason Heikenfeld has now launched his 3rd startup company, Eccrine Systems LLC, to pursue commercialization of wearable sensor technology that replaces blood-based measurements by non-invasively stimulating and detecting biomarkers in sweat. The related fundamental research at UC also involves collaboration with EECS Profs. Ian Papautsky and Fred Beyette, and EECS adjunct research Prof. Joshua Hagen.